A quick search of the results in Google will show more than 8 pages of companies advertising their services or programs to submit your website to the search engines.

The prices varied wildly, but the fact of the matter is that any site submitter or company offering search engine submissions is just taking your money. (It’s kind of like paying an ATM fee).

Here’s the honest truth. Unless you run a local business, there’s no point to submitting your website to Google, Yahoo, or MSN. If you do have a local business, then making sure your local listing is claimed on their maps and your proper information is included is a good idea.

Let me explain. This is one of those services designed to prey on the new and uninformed website owners. Let me explain how your website gets indexed by major search engines like Google. All search engines use programs called spiders to crawl the Internet. Basically, this is a program that hops from one website to another and reads everything on the page. It then looks for links and goes to those pages next. When it finds a link to a website that it hasn’t seen before, it reads that page and includes it in the search engine index pages (SERPS).

The time it takes your website to appear on the search engines varies wildly – I’ve seen anywhere from 22 minutes to 6 weeks.

The search engines all have a free “submit url search engine” page you can use to submit your website to them, but it’s rather pointless to use since I just explained their preferred way to rank a website. Heck, sometimes you don’t have to submit a website or get a link in an way, shape, or form, since they look at new newly registered domains and check those out once in a while. So, yes, it is even possible to get your website listed in the search engines for free without ever doing a thing (getting ranked well is another story, however).

So do yourself a favor and save your money on these programs and companies. If you ever see a company offering to submit your company to thousands of search engines, take a moment to think of how many search engines you can name off the top of your head. If you’re like most people, you might be able to list 4 or 5. I do this for a living and I was only able to come up with 10.
In fact, the top 5 search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN/Live, Ask, AOL) have a combined 99.7% market share! That means the other thousands of search engines out there are fighting for .3% of the market.

In other words, you’re not going to see any traffic from those search engines no matter how well you rank. And if those search engines are any good, you won’t need to submit your url to them since all search engines follow links and if you have links to your website, they’ll include you.